Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By : Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By: Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky

Overview of this book

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions. You’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You’ll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you’ll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency. This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented. By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
10
Other Books You May Enjoy
11
Index

Composite models

Occasionally, you may find it helpful for your data model to take a hybrid approach regarding how it stores data. For example, you want sales transactions to be displayed in near real time on your dashboard, so you set your SalesTransaction table to use DirectQuery. However, your Product table rarely has values that are added or changed. Having values that do not change often make it a great candidate for the imported data storage method to take advantage of the performance benefits.

This describes a perfect scenario for utilizing a feature called composite models. Composite models allow a single Power BI solution to include both DirectQuery and import table connections within one data model. From the Power BI developer's perspective, you can take advantage of the best parts of each data storage mode within your design.

Another effective use case for composite models is available due to a feature called aggregations. Leveraging aggregations is...